VIA releases competitive Pentium 4 chipset

VIA is busy today, launching its first Pentium 4 chipset not under a legal cloud of suspicion in some time. The PT800 only has a single channel of DDR400 work with, but does support an 800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading, AGP 8X, and a laundry list of other features via the new VT8237 south bridge.

The folks over at HardOCP managed to get their hands on a PT800 reference board from VIA and have run it through the wringer. Despite the chipset's huge memory bandwidth disadvantage when compared with Intel's Canterwood 875P, the PT800 is surprisingly competitive. In fact, the PT800 even steals a few wins from Intel's flagship chipset, though we'll have to wait and see how well retail boards perform.